


A Summer's Day

by edenbound



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:35:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24537076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenbound/pseuds/edenbound
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley are having a picnic, and Aziraphale just so happens to notice something he's somehow never seen before in all the (many) times he's looked at Crowley...
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 82





	A Summer's Day

It's a nice beach, if you like beaches of this sort. Pebbly and rocky, with crags that hold interesting little pools fringed with seaweed and studded with limpets. A short stretch of firm wet sand, studded still with little pebbles to bite at your feet if you choose to take your shoes off and wade. And then the chilly sea, rushing hungrily up the sand, eating at the pebbled shore. There's a grassy cliff above, ideal for picnics, and the car park holds at best two cars and a collection of motorcycles. At this moment, it contains one car, and only one car, and a single ice-cream van. 

(It also contains the owner of the aforementioned ice-cream van, who isn't quite sure how he took this wrong turn but has decided to take it philosophically.)

This is in fact the sort of beach preferred by Crowley and Aziraphale who, having had quite enough of having sand in unusual places over their very many years of experience, sensibly want to avoid it as much as possible. It is the sort of beach that exists mostly because they expect it to, and Crowley has more than once entertained the suspicion that it would disappear altogether if they should happen to stop believing it ought to exist. Crowley has a healthy respect for the way humans can eat up something unattended, if it seems like nobody wants it. They're like seagulls that way, he muses, watching two (seagulls, that is, not humans) tussling over the remains of Aziraphale's ham sandwich.

"I was eating that," Aziraphale says, a little petulantly. "I was going to finish it." 

"Don't argue with seagulls. Bigger than they look."

"They're just birds, Crowley."

"Try it and see. My money? It's on the birds."

"Oh, well," Aziraphale says, and doesn't move. There are plenty more goodies in the basket, anyway, and the afternoon sun is warm, and the light is glorious. He could watch the sun on the sea all day. He glances at Crowley and finds that behind his sunglasses and his slouching, put-upon posture -- as if a picnic is the last thing he should ever be asked to indulge Aziraphale with -- Crowley's face is tilted up into the warmth and his eyes are on the bright endless stretch of the sky.

He's beautiful. 

This isn't a new thought for Aziraphale, of course. He's thought it again and again since the first time Crowley came to stand beside him on the walls of Eden. He's never had many illusions about it, no matter how he tried to behave, how he pushed Crowley away. He has loved Crowley in all times, in all places, the beat of it steady throughout the brief spans of time when he saw Crowley and the centuries when he did not, beating out a rhythm of _not yet, not yet_. He has loved Crowley silently, in Rome and in Paris and in London. In Tadfield. And he's never felt it was something which should be said.

He has looked at him, again and again, in all these places, moods and tenses. Across snowy white tablecloths, across cheap formica tables, across every space he carefully put between them.

So there are two new thoughts in this moment.

Firstly: he can tell Crowley now. There is absolutely no reason not to. He trusts him with everything, anything, to the end of the world and back and to the end of the world again. And nothing can come between them now, no harm can ensue.

Secondly: Crowley has freckles.

For some reason it is the latter thought which is most difficult to wrap his head around. Crowley has freckles, and the thought of it somehow makes Aziraphale's heart squeeze in his chest. Crowley has freckles dusted across the bridge of his nose and his cheeks, and he absolutely can lean across the picnic basket and kiss each and every one of them.

Crowley might just have freckles elsewhere, too. Across his shoulders, perhaps. And Aziraphale can kiss every single one of those, too.

"Dearest," he says. Crowley turns to him, slides down the sunglasses so their eyes meet across their tops, and Aziraphale's heart pounds and flutters in his chest and its beat says only _now now now_.

He is aflame when he takes that beloved face in his hands and holds it still to be kissed. He is a conflagration by the time he puts his lips against Crowley's, a phoenix when Crowley's lips move under his and his head tilts and they fit together, picnic basket shoved aside and moving closer closer _closer_ \--

"Angel," Crowley breathes, when their lips part.

"You have freckles," Aziraphale tells him. And proceeds to kiss them, each and every one.

It takes a while.

* * *

As they leave the beach, the sun is meandering toward the horizon, and the long slow sunset has set the whole sky aflame. Aziraphale wants an ice-cream, and Crowley hands the owner of the ice-cream van a fifty-pound note in exchange for a double cone with strawberry sauce and a chocolate flake. He carries fifties only, solely to annoy people who then have to make change for them, so on reflection he puts another fifty on top of the first, to keep it company. He does feel a _little_ bit of remorse about bringing the guy out here instead of letting him go to a kiddie park or something, where he'd have more than one customer. Not to mention keeping him there so long. 

So: "Keep the change," Crowley says. They do say couples get more and more like each other over time, after all. Perhaps this is how it starts.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the various artworks (e.g. [PanyLuna's](https://www.pillowfort.social/PanyLuna)) that give Crowley freckles even though I have inspected David Tennant's face carefully in screenshots and cannot see any trace of [his freckles](https://66.media.tumblr.com/72420b494d9d97fb0fcacf636450a3d0/tumblr_mgbctsdeYH1rdcswxo3_1280.jpg). You are doing God's work, fanartists.
> 
> Also, I'm sorry, Aziraphale, but I am also betting on the seagulls. A seagull stole my entire burger once, right out of my hand, in the centre of Cardiff! I was a sad, hungry student that day.


End file.
